The Impact of Motivational “World‐view” on Engagement in a Cognitive Acceleration Programme

Abstract

Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) is an intervention programme conducted during Years 7 and 8 in the United Kingdom (aged 11–13 years), which has reported remarkable success in enhancing cognitive development and in raising academic achievement. Critics, however, have questioned whether a purely cognitive mechanism can explain the differential cognitive gains made by participants. One suggestion is that differences in motivational style might provide an explanation. This paper will present findings from a longitudinal study that addresses this matter. Utilising a goal theory approach to motivation, the motivational orientation, related beliefs, and self‐concepts of approximately 1600 secondary students attending nine schools, five of whom were delivering the CASE intervention, were assessed before and at the end of the programme. Analyses of these data suggested that students exhibit six different motivational styles or world‐views. These will be characterised. Change in motivation can be gauged by examining changes in world‐view over the time‐span of the research (the first 2 years of secondary schooling). Differences in the change of motivation of students for students attending CASE and control schools will be inspected. Finally, the relationship between motivation and cognitive gain, which turns out to be complex, will be presented. The implications of these findings, including whether world‐view can explain differential cognitive acceleration effects, will be discussed.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Philip Adey and John Gray for helping develop aspects of this paper.

Notes

1. It was the intention to have five matched control schools, however this proved difficult to organise in the time period available. Several schools initially approached as more ideal matches dropped out at the last minute. A replacement was found for one of these schools, hence the research proceeded with four control schools that were not ideally matched. It is acknowledged that this poses a threat to the internal validity of the findings.

2. Nicholls’ scale does not assess ego‐approach and ego‐avoid orientation on separate scales, although the ego scale contains items referring to both types of ego orientation. It would have been desirable to have used an instrument distinguishing these, such as the “Patterns of Adaptive Learning Survey” (Midgley et al., 1997), but these were not available at the time the research design was being finalised. Use of the cluster analysis (see later) technique to some extent overcomes this difficulty.

3. Only the alienation scales significantly departed from normality. A power transformation was applied but this did not remedy the situation. Given the sample size, many parametric tests are robust to departures from normality; therefore, the analysis proceeded with the raw data.

4. This also included an analysis of students missing world‐view classifications at either pre‐test or post‐test, as it was only possible to assign world‐views at both pre‐test and post‐test to 814 of the original 1591 students.

5. As previously world‐view type rather than actual world‐view was examined, in this case due to small numbers.